


meet me in the woods

by mahalidael



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Gen, Isolation, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Wilderness Survival, in which the consequences of a human spending a decade+ in the ghost zone are explored, sprints to podium and leans into mic: FIRST
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:07:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28054377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mahalidael/pseuds/mahalidael
Summary: When Danny is two years old, his cousin Flynn goes missing and is never found.When Danny is fourteen years old, he notices a blip on the radar that shouldn't be there.(Formerly titled "Those Familiar Spirits.")
Comments: 26
Kudos: 120





	1. i took a little journey into the unknown

**Author's Note:**

> first fic ive written for danny phantom and it's a meme taken seriously. what are the odds. (the odds were 100%)

Danny was two years old when the police came to their house. He must have thought the flashing lights were fireworks; he ran outside alone to look.

He saw uniforms, a funny black and white car, and a great deal of shouting between the grown-ups. It was July, and very muggy. Flies buzzed around the police cars’ lights as Mom and Dad talked very quietly, and Aunt Alicia yelled, and the police said ma’am, please, we’re trying to help, could you just, ma’am. _Ma’am._

Danny ran up to get a better look but was promptly swept up by a police officer and carried back inside as he craned his neck to hear what they were saying.

Mom went inside for a minute and made him and Jazz sit on the couch. She told them gravely, “We’re just going to talk to the nice policemen, okay? Don’t go out there.”

Danny huffed. Jazz noticed his irritation and spoke up. “Can we watch TV if we stay inside?”

“Mm-hm,” said Mom, looking out the window at the lights again, already standing up and gravitating towards them.

Jazz reached for the TV remote and hit the power button with an ease that a four year old will only exhibit when provided with sufficiently busy parents. Danny started chewing on his shirt sleeve as images flashed on the screen; they were big kid cartoons that he had no interest in.

“Mom?” said Jazz, peeking up over the back of the couch.

Mom paused in the doorway and addressed one of the policemen before turning back to Jazz. “Just a second — yeah?”

“Where’s Flynn? He likes this show.”

“Um,” said Mom.

She cleared her throat.

“That’s what the policemen are going to help us with. I’m sure he’ll be back before it’s over.”

Their cousin was not back before it was over. He wasn’t back at all, but this, like most everything else from when he was two years old, fell through Danny’s memory like it was water.

* * *

Jack had been wary of his sister-in-law coming over for a week. He’d also been wary when Maddie described her sister’s marriage as “getting better” and said that she was “calling off the divorce.”

Anyway, within two days of the visit Danny had gotten it into his head that his uncle’s name was Damn-It-Bob.

But the most disconcerting thing was that Jack couldn’t do much about the situation. Alicia was a notoriously private person, and considered the matter of her marriage between herself, Maddie, and Damn-It-Bob. Trying to get close enough to be allowed into that inner circle was an exercise in self-endangerment. He had tried exactly once in college, and the dislocated wrist he’d gotten out of that arm wrestling match nearly cost him his scholarship.

Getting through to Damn-It-Bob was even more frustrating. Alicia, at least, cared about Maddie’s studies. She didn’t understand them, but looked on with interest as Maddie expertly extracted a sample from the latest ghost specimen and held it up to the light for her sister to see.

Damn-It-Bob was worse than an outsider. He was a _snob_.

Damn-It-Bob looked like if Alicia didn’t already have a pickup truck, he’d drive a Prius, and if he ever tried tikka masala he’d brag about it. Jack had to assume that if Alicia married him, they had to have some kind of common ground, but damn if he couldn’t figure out what it was. And apparently neither could they.

He had a degree in aerospace engineering, which he constantly emphasized was a really _useful_ science. Alicia didn’t even have to work at the logging company if she didn’t want to keep up the family business. 

He tried to charm the kids with pictures of the rockets he’d designed. It worked on Danny, which, yeah, okay, he was two years old, but Jazz seemed to pick up his intentions and tried to steer Danny away. Jeez. If Jack left her alone for five minutes, she might be doing calculus when he came back.

And then there was the kid.

He didn’t even notice that he was there until the Walkers were standing in the living room. Jack had walked behind Alicia to hang up their coats and suddenly saw him standing right behind her.

The kid hadn’t said a word in the entire thirty-minute production of his family coming inside — or if he had, he hadn’t been listened to. He had this sort of rust-colored hair that stuck out in all directions, like they tied up a big ponytail on the top of his head and chopped it off instead of giving him a real haircut.

Getting closer, Jack finally saw why the kid wasn’t talking. He had his nose buried in some book. Oh, so he was one of _those_ , Jack thought. He hadn’t personally been a child who devoured books like a woodchipper, but Vlad had.

In any case, silent reading hour was over. “Hey, bucko!” said Jack. The kid nearly jumped out of his skin, one hand snapping the book shut like a cell phone at the end of a tense call. “Thirsty for knowledge, I see? We’ve got more down in the lab.”

He shrunk away. Alicia noticed and put a hand on his shoulder as she turned her attention away from Maddie. “—so that’s how the union settled. And you two remember Flynn, right?” she said, ruffling the kid’s hair. “We brought him to Danny’s baby shower. He was so shy back then you thought the table was set by a ghost for a solid thirty minutes.”

Maddie’s eyes landed on Flynn and lit up in recognition. “Oh, yeah! I remember. You were at least a head shorter last time we saw you.”

Flynn nodded, staring at his shoes. He hugged the book to his chest like it was a stuffed animal.

Alicia and her husband chuckled politely. “Well, you might have seen him earlier if you didn’t pull out your toys to try and find that ghost,” said her husband, less politely.

“Bob, could you please be civil?” Alicia said under her breath.

“The event was delayed by an hour and we missed our flight over a bunch of—”

“Damn it, Bob—”

“It was a poltergeist, technically,” Maddie laughed nervously, stepping between them, a note of _oh lord not this again_ in her voice.

“Hey, kids, how about we go down to the basement and check out some cool gadgets?” Jack was itching to take Flynn and the children downstairs. He had to ditch the conversation before it went south. “Wanna see what ghost bones look like?”

Flynn actually looked like he was going to respond to that, but Damn-It-Bob cut in. “Flynn probably wouldn’t be interested in _theoretical_ science. He likes studying useful things.”

Yeah, ectoscience was _theoretical_. You could tell it was bad because it was italicized.

Jack resisted the urge to get passive-aggressive right back. Not in front of the children. “There’s plenty of physical things in the lab that I’m sure Flynn’s gonna love. Every kid loves lasers. Right, Danny?” he queried his son, who was chewing on the leg of the coffee table.

Danny blew a raspberry, which he assumed was a yes. Jack managed to whisk them away before the Walkers started swearing at each other.

He put Jazz and Danny down in the little area of the lab that they’d sectioned off with a foldable plastic dog gate, where Jazz made herself busy putting all the crayons in a straight line before Danny picked them up and started scribbling on the rubber tiled floor.

“So, Flynn! We’ve got some whosits and whatsits to check out. That catches ghosts,” Jack said, pointing at the gadgets skewed across the counter like exploded, “this blasts ghosts, that catches _and_ blasts ghosts, and this is a hot dog maker. What do you wanna see first?”

Flynn shrugged and shuffled an inch backwards.

Okay, this wasn’t going anywhere. Which was odd — they’d opened up the ops center to tourists in the past for alternate revenue, and kids always seemed to be the most excited about the gadgets.

Plan B, he guessed. “What’s that book about, anyway?” he said.

Flynn hesitantly held out the book. Jack took it. It was a big, heavy book, with a hard cover titled _The Collected Jack London_. Jack went to open it to a random page, but was interrupted when his leafing caused something to fall out from between the pages.

It was a flower. Flynn quickly snatched it off the floor and took his book back, scowling. “It’s sabatia geu — sabatia geutianoides,” he muttered. “It’s one of the rarest flowers in Arkansas, so I can’t pick another one.” He then very carefully flipped to another page in the book, counting the page numbers in whispers until he found the one he was looking for and slipped the flower back inside.

Ah. He could work with that. “Really? Is it the rarest one you’ve got?” he said, posing a challenge.

“Uh, I have Stern’s medlar, but just a leaf I got off the ground. They’re cruh — crit — _crit-i-cal-ly_ endangered.”

“We’ve got some samples of a pretty rare plant ourselves.”

Flynn’s eyes lit up. “Can I see them?”

Jack took Flynn off into a side room. This room was mostly like the last, though being closed to visitors, it was far less organized. He picked Flynn up and lifted him over a heap of spare parts on the floor. “Watch your step.”

A cacophony of containers were heaped on a table in the center of the room. Only a few of them were planter pots that they’d already owned; the rest were old shoeboxes and burned-out pots and pans. They were all filled with soil. Their occupants stretched their purple-black stems towards the overhead sun lamp.

“ _Rosa sanguinea_ , also known as the Massachusetts blood blossom,” said Jack. “They were grown in the 1600s — apparently they release an anti-ghost vapor. Unfortunately, we can’t prove whether it works, since we don’t have any intact ghosts to test it on, but they’re delicious.”

“That’s so weird.” Flynn rubbed a black leaf between his fingers, as if he expected the color to come off. “Roses aren’t normally hardy enough to grow inside. And the leaves are naturally black?”

“Yep. Well, maybe. We think they were mutated by long-term exposure to ecto-energy. The biggest patch of them is around Salem, and that place is a hotspot for the natural portals to the dimension ghosts live in,” he said, pointing at the pictures of such that they’d pinned to the corkboard across the room. Jack himself couldn’t believe some of the places that they’d found natural portals in. One of the pictures on the corkboard was of a portal they’d found in a public toilet. “They’re stubborn little buggers, but only in ecto-energized soil — we had to cart the dirt in these pots all the way back from Massachusetts.”

Jack snapped his fingers.

“I’ve got an idea.” He picked up a blood blossom growing in a mason jar and handed it to Flynn. “That’s yours now. Take it back to Arkansas, and it’ll protect you from ghosts.”

“Really?” said Flynn, seemingly more awestruck by the plant itself than any properties it might’ve had. “I can have it?”

“All yours! After all, who knows when you might need it?”

* * *

Flynn hadn’t wanted to leave Arkansas. He hadn’t wanted to sit in Mom’s funny-smelling truck for ten-odd hours while listening to them argue about money, and ghosts, and damn it Bob, would it kill you to put the toilet paper in the holder the right way just once?

At some of the rest stops, Flynn had stood in the bathroom and stared in the mirror. The door was right behind him and Dad hadn’t left the stall yet. He could just turn around and run into the woods, so Mom and Dad would talk about something other than their horrible marriage.

Because Flynn was ten years old, and the problem that he saw was nothing as complex as an incompatibility of personality, or people growing apart. The problem he saw was that they needed to shut up about the divorce.

That was all he wanted. Something to come in and make them shut up, and make the divorce go away, and put things back where they were supposed to be.

But obviously that’s not how things work. Flynn went outside and picked dandelions that were growing at the edge of the parking lot, and he held them outside the window while they were driving so the seeds would scatter all along the road, and he still ended up visiting Uncle Jack and Aunt Maddie in New York, and Mom and Dad were still fighting over stupid stuff.

Flynn kept trying to put off the tour. He knew that Dad would hate the lab. He stuck with real things, metal and chalk numbers — never mind that one of the major points of contention was the slew of Young Living boxes sitting in their garage. A better statement was that Dad rejected any science he didn’t think he could exploit. Like, son, wildflowers are nice and all, but you know that the real money’s in saffron, right? It sells for twenty-five hundred a pop and it’s not getting any cheaper. Just think about it, son.

“ —converts ectoplasm into a power source.” Aunt Maddie was showing them something embedded in the lab wall. Flynn didn’t really like ectoscience either, but that was mostly because the topic freaked him out. He didn’t like when his friends played that pencil game that let you talk to ghosts, much less when his uncle talked about ripping them apart _mmmolecule_ by _mmmolecule._

It just felt kind of rude. They were people, at some point. Everyone knew a dead person.

“Quaint,” said Dad, turning over the hot dog maker he had found on the counter. “Very quaint.” It was his usual word of condemnation. “What’s that hole in the wall?”

It was barely a hole. Not so much because of size, but because it was so badly occupied by a tangle of wire that actually entering it would be impossible. Aunt Maddie said: “Our prototype for a stable portal into the ghost zone.” Dad scoffed, but she smiled tightly and ignored it. “With a reliable and stationary portal, we can collect data faster.”

“And it took you ten years to think of that?”

“Bob, if you don’t want to see it, you can just wait in the guest room,” said Mom, rubbing her temples.

“No, it’s fine, Alicia.” Aunt Maddie sighed. “We’ve _been_ thinking of it. It just took this long to make sure building a portal large enough for a human to enter would be safe. A few years ago, a friend of ours was injured by one that wasn’t any bigger than a car tire — precautions needed to be taken—”

Dad put up his hand in a ‘halt’ gesture. “So, wait. You _know_ that those things can hurt people, and yet you build a big one in your basement, and _let your kids in here_?”

“They’re at a safe distance — they’re not even on the same side of the lab,” said Aunt Maddie, eyes narrow.

“Oh, thank goodness you let your toddlers play _some paces_ away from a _potential biohazard!_ ” Dad threw up his hands in fake relief. “I guess that makes it okay, then!”

Aunt Maddie looked like she was gearing up to shout. But she glanced at her kids in their little corner hutch, and seemed to think better of it. “Look, Bob, I — help me understand. Five minutes ago you were calling ghosts ‘fairy tales,’ and now you’re getting on about potentially endangering _my_ children with something that, by your own logic, shouldn’t do anything. What’s your _real_ problem?”

“My ‘real problem’ is that, ghosts or not — and there are certainly _not_ — the fact that someone got hurt at all tells me that you’re tampering with something that you don’t understand—”

“Bob, that’s _enough_ —”

Seed dispersion was one of the fundamental adaptations of the plant world. A seed that dropped straight down from its parent plant was a dead seed. It wouldn’t be able to access sufficient nutrition, water, or light so close.

Mom exiled him and Dad from the lab so she could have a good talk with Aunt Maddie. Uncle Jack awkwardly let them sit on the couch and watch NCIS with him.

“I just think that pseudoscience has no place in being the primary income for a family,” said Dad.

Uncle Jack nodded with a poorly disguised grimace.

“Anyway, have you heard that lavender has anti-autism properties?”

Uncle Jack suddenly excused himself to go to the bathroom. Luckily, Dad seemed to think that the distant laughter was coming from the TV.

Dandelions had a nasty taxonomy. They were wind-dispersed, able to fly up to sixty miles away from their parent plant, where they isolated and readily speciated. This was a large part of the reason why Flynn couldn’t appreciate them without every adult in an eighty-mile radius screaming _it’s a weed!_

By Sunday, Mom and Dad couldn’t be in the same room together without shouting.

By Wednesday, they wouldn’t speak to each other at all.

By Saturday, they started calling the divorce lawyer again.

That night before they went back to Arkansas, Flynn slept on his aunt and uncle’s couch. He could hear Mom and Dad talking in the guest room above. At indoor voice levels. He didn’t know whether that was good or bad.

The potted blood blossom sat on the end table atop _Jack London_. 

He was woken up at two in the morning when something spritzed him in the face like he was a cat. Flynn squinted in the darkness for what it could be and was immediately spritzed again. He wiped the spray off his face and jolted at the sight of a red smear on his wrist.

A faint hiss was coming from the end table. Flynn watched as the blood blossom emitted a quiet red steam into the air.

He looked around the room nervously. Then he looked out the front window.

At the very end of the street, between the buildings, there was a faint green glow that looked very much like Uncle Jack’s pictures.

Well, of course dandelions were weeds. When something survived too well, humans inevitably got all up in their business, trying to trammel them in. It was a weed because it didn’t cooperate with that.

Flynn didn’t need to pack his bag; he had already loaded everything from the trip back in, but he added some more anyway. He got a knife, a frying pan, and a BIC lighter out of the kitchen. And of course, he took his book and the blood blossom.

Then he walked out the front door for the last time.

It was a muggy July night, and all the lights in the windows were out. The streetlamps pooled in the road. The green light creeped into the alleyway on tiptoe.

Flynn stood before a hole in the world and found himself alone. The hole didn’t appear to properly occupy the alley. It looked like a bad photoshop in person. Just standing a foot away from it, he could feel the static electricity. It felt like it was ruffling his hair in a gesture of approval.

There was a deep hum that might have been the portal, or the flies buzzing around it, or Flynn’s heart getting ready to tear itself from his chest in excitement or fear. He did not know which.

The blood blossom was beginning to overflow its mason jar with red condensation. Flynn poured it out onto the ground. It mixed with the dank puddles in the mundane depressions of the concrete that, absurdly, continued to exist in the presence of something so otherworldly.

Flynn reached through the portal. It felt like cold water — strange, but not icy enough to be unpleasant.

This was what he needed. Something he didn’t know, somewhere his parents couldn’t find him. He could find shelter with those familiar spirits for a little while, and his blood blossom would protect him as his parents looked for him, and then he would come back and they would be so happy and angry to see him that they wouldn’t talk about the divorce again for another year at least, and it would be nice, and it would just be so nice, it would just be so nice when he got back.

And then the light consumed his vision.

* * *

Twelve years later.

“Jazz? Did you just come through the portal?” Danny squinted at the readout on the specter speeder — the constant green light of the ghost zone made it hard to read at times.

“No?” she said over the speeder’s radio. “I’m still in the lab, why?”

“Because the radar’s picking up signs of life.”


	2. and i’ve come back changed, i can feel it in my bones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> first meeting [GONE WRONG] [GONE SOUPY]
> 
> also, quick side note. this fic takes place a few days after kindred spirits, so any canon info that danny is supposed to learn afterwards is unknown to him. you'll see what i mean in a second

Here’s what happens within the first twenty-four hours of a missing persons investigation.

911 is called. The case is reported. If the missing person is elderly, thirteen or under, or suffers from a medical condition, the case is a “special category.” An AMBER Alert is put out.

In special category cases, as many resources will be mobilized as possible. But in all cases, local precincts handle the case first and foremost. This can be a hiccup. If the precinct in question learns that the house the child went missing from is, in fact, the same house that they’ve been called to multiple times over noise complaints, fire code complaints, and general environmental hazards, then it might take them a while to even notice that there appears to be a small pool of blood in the alleyway down the street.

They give that blood a little analysis, and it doesn’t take long for the lab to come back with the result that it’s just plant nectar. It doesn’t matter much to the police, anyway. They keep interviewing the owners of the house over and over, long after the child’s mother tells them to knock it off, leave her sister alone, and investigate the actual scene of the crime.

The police, finally, are stumped. They’ve tried everything: investigating the people they instantly assumed did it, making only the most begrudging of efforts to investigate the only actual evidence they collected, and grilling the mother who was not cooperating with the police and saying suspicious things, like “why aren’t you collecting evidence” and “would it kill you to actually find my fucking son.”

But let’s be fair. Even if the county police hadn’t been composed entirely of idiots, they still wouldn’t have gotten anywhere, not with a missing piece of the puzzle — or more precisely, a piece of the puzzle that didn’t exist in their eyes. Like ghosts.

In any case, none of these steps had been taken for Dani, because nobody knew that she existed.

At first, Danny had taken her at her word that she would be fine and he’d see her again. Watching her fly away, at first nothing occurred to him. It was only an hour later that he thought, hold on a second.

Danny had no idea where Dani was going.

It was probably nothing to be worried about. After all, she couldn’t exactly go back to Vlad. She could probably take care of herself. She seemed pretty mature — she was — she had ghost powers, right? It would be fine.

Probably.

Maybe.

...Okay, he couldn’t do this.

Eventually the anxiety got to be too much, and he had to tell the closest thing he had to an adult about the situation so he could round up a modest search party. To which Jazz responded: “ _You let an unsupervised twelve year old fly off into the sunset?!”_

But getting that unsupervised twelve year old back from the sunset was easier said than done. The main hitch presented itself in the fact that only a handful of people knew that she was even missing: Danny and company, and of course Vlad. They had carefully arbitrated whether to file a missing persons report, but in the end they decided against. Explaining where Dani came from to the cops was just too risky. They searched the existing database of missing persons for good measure, and found that Vlad hadn’t filed a report either, presumably for the same reasons.

Finding Dani the human was out. Now they had to look for Dani the ghost.

So there they were. And there was the scanner for the new specter speeder.

“Why are we searching the Ghost Zone? How would Dani even get in here?” Sam had been taking her turn steering — the stick for the new speeder was weirdly stiff, and an hour of flying the thing made your wrists die a little. She rubbed her eye, purple eyeshadow smearing on her hand.

“Well, ghosts are attracted to other ghosts, and they usually come through existing portals,” Tucker said, watching an ectopus swish gently by the windshield. “Maybe she’ll get curious and poke her head in?”

Danny grimaced, sliding down into his seat. “I would _hope_ that she has better sense than that.”

The radio crackled to life. “Better sense, my ass,” Jazz chimed — she’d stayed at home to study and/or cover their asses if Mom and Dad got home and noticed that the speeder was missing. But they were at some sort of expo, so that wouldn’t be for a couple more hours.

“I know, Jazz.”

“How ‘responsible’ can a twelve year old _be_?”

“Jazz. I get it, I messed up — can we just focus on finding Dani?”

“I’m just saying, I’m four years older than her and I got peanut butter in my ear trying to make breakfast this morning.”

Sam switched hands on the joystick and gave it a little impatient push, shoving them back in their seats slightly. “Still haven’t answered my question — why don’t we just turn on the speeder’s ghost detection scanner and fly it around Amity Park?”

“Sam, I’m an older sister, not a miracle worker, as closely as those two roles are related. If you decide to fly an entire hovercraft around town in plain sight, only g—”

“ _Real world items detected._ ”

The scanner pinged for the first time in nearly thirty minutes, causing the crew to jump out of their skin. Danny sat up and squinted at it.

“—od can help you,” Jazz finished. “Did the thing go off again?”

“The thing went off again,” replied Danny.

Danny wasn’t too excited — the scanner had gone off almost ten times in the two hours they’d been sweeping the Ghost Zone. Most of those alarms were just picking up clumps of trash. An old basketball, a boot, a kid’s balloon. A couple times it turned out that they were passing Walker’s prison, and it was probably picking up his stash of confiscated items, but just to be sure Danny cashed in a favor from Johnny 13, and no, Dani wasn’t in there, but Walker had tried stapling his shadow to a wall when it snuck in, so next time the two met Danny was dead meat, apparently.

So, a typical interaction in the Ghost Zone. Here’s hoping he wasn’t about to have another, Danny thought as he got ready to phase out of the speeder.

“ _Signs of life detected._ ”

Danny paused halfway out of the windshield and pulled himself back in. “Jazz? Did you just come through the portal?”

Jazz must have stepped away for a second; the sound of her running back over to the mic was audible over the radio. “No? I’m still in the lab, why?”

“Because the scanner’s picking up signs of life.”

Tucker was already flipping through the scanner’s functions to see where the alert was coming from. “Your parents’ UI is super janky,” he said. “You gotta ask them to put in a separate filter for life signs — if we knew that it could pick that up, you know how much faster this would’ve gone?”

“Nope, not even gonna think about it,” said Sam, leaning back in her seat and grinding her palms into her closed eyes. “I’m gonna get too mad if I do.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It could be a squirrel or something that just wandered into a portal. We can’t tell until we see it.” Jazz’s voice was pointed.

“Alright, I get the picture.”

Danny could fly in the real world, and he could fly in the Ghost Zone, but these were two different experiences. Flying in the real world felt blissful. Weightless, gravity-less, like what he imagined bouncing on the moon to feel like.

Flying in the Ghost Zone felt like swimming in a cool, green ocean. Pressure and currents, buoyancy and whirlpools. Even breathing in the Ghost Zone felt like breathing water, though without the burning panic of inhaling real seawater. It was honestly a little disconcerting how close the resemblance was, right down to the only orientation being the gentle tug of some kind of gravity trying to pull him down into the depths.

Danny was never super fond of the water, but he also hadn’t been aquaphobic before the portal opened. Now? Well, he didn’t look at lakes the same way anymore, that was for sure.

“Okay,” said Danny. “Which way?”

“Ahead and below,” Tucker called through the glass. “You’re probably gonna be leading; there’s some turbulence pushing us back.”

He made a little salute. “Roger that.”

“Some turbulence” was an understatement. Usually Danny could get through the Ghost Zone’s cytoplasm without actually having to swim, but the current was so intense that he’d get pushed back if he didn’t.

He could feel his skin break into goosebumps as he started using his arms to push ahead. The deep parts of the Ghost Zone were usually the bad side of town. If he was going down here for another boot, he was gonna be pissed.

It was not another boot.

Danny hesitated above the realm. It wasn’t very big, as far as realms went. It was mostly taken up by a thicket of dark trees, with a single tall crag jutting from its side. Realms usually didn’t have this sort of outdoor area — it was typical for them to be little more than a single building floating in the void. This one was all outdoors.

He could only think of two other realms he’d seen that had any surrounding land: Prince Aragon’s, where the point was to keep all his subjects trapped in there with him, and Skulker’s, which was for hunting practice.

The current started pushing him backwards — if he didn’t make a decision it was going to be made for him.

Danny swallowed his reservations and started moving towards the realm.

He had to grab the top of a tree to pivot down. Patches of ground generally felt more earth-like than the open; his parents were trying to work out the physics for that, but if Danny had to guess it was for the same reasons that realms tended to form around the desires of the ghosts they housed. It reminded them of what being alive felt like.

Danny kept his ears pricked up for anyone approaching, but heard nothing but a faint crackle in the distance, and the whisper of the trees. It struck him then how quiet these realms were. No buzz of insects, very little wind.

Okay, he was already implicitly risking his neck just by being down here, so he might as well check where that mysterious crackle was coming from.

Danny didn’t know what to expect from the Ghost Zone before the portal opened. What he _certainly_ didn’t was the light — not very bright, but constant and sourceless and a serious impediment to finding other things that emitted light, like ghosts, or a campfire.

Danny paused.

The campfire wasn’t very large. Its fodder seemed to be from the tree that had been chopped down several yards away from it and was halfway through the process of being whacked apart into little wedges.

As he approached, Danny was surprised by the color of the fire. Well, he knew what fire looked like, but fire in the Ghost Zone that wasn’t, like, green or blue or something was weird to see.

Even more surprising, there was a frying pan over the fire, suspended by a low structure of propped sticks. On the stump, a mason jar of water, on top of a thick book that looked so heavily pawed at that the title had been worn off the cover.

Danny felt his heart skip a beat with relief — it had to be Dani. A ghost would have no use for food or water or books.

He reached for the lid of the pan and was immediately burned by the steam.

Danny yelped and withdrew, but the pain didn’t decrease. It burned and crawled up his arm like a live thing. He reeled away and against a tree, where the pain sunk down under the hazmat suit and simmered into an acidic burn. “God! Jesus,” he hissed.

He looked back at the pan and more closely at the steam. It was an angry, unnatural red. What on earth was— 

Hold that thought. Movement. A lanky, shuffling figure emerged from between the trees.

It towered a head above Danny despite leaning on a walking stick, its wispy and copious hair the color of a tabby cat, with white all around the front. Its clothes were so lumpy and patchwork that it appeared more like the figure had rolled in them than they had been put on by any mechanism. And when it raised its startled eyes to regard Danny they were beyond bloodshot; the sclera of its eyes appeared completely overrun with blood.

It wasn’t Dani. And it wasn’t happy to see him.

Danny wound up for a blast, a green shine forming in his hand that the— 

The ghost… that seemed oddly fascinated with the trappings of a campsite, of all things?

You know what, now wasn’t the time.

—would hopefully take seriously.

And it did take it seriously, or at least it seemed to. It held up its hands in surrender.

Its fingers were nearly transparent where they poked out of worn gloves, to the point where Danny could’ve counted its bones if he wanted to.

But Danny didn’t want to. “Who are you?” he demanded.

The figure seemed to struggle to speak. “T-t-t—” it sputtered. “T-t-t—”

...Right, this was just sad.

Danny always felt a little bit uncomfortable fighting these dazed types. At first fighting the Box Ghost was frustrating, but now he kind of felt _bad_ , like, if this guy were alive he’d be checking his wristband and getting him to go home and take his medicine, not beating the hell out of him, good god.

The ghosts that just seemed kind of confused and tired, which, as both a newfound half-ghost and a fourteen year old, were the ones that Danny related to most. It was a damn shame that even the confused and tired ones kept trying to kill him. 

He lowered his hand. “Look, I don’t wanna hurt you, I’m just looking for someone. Have you seen a girl around here?”

The figure blinked. It felt futile to ask at all, but Danny was just really sick of not being able to hold a simple conversation in this place without punching happening.

“Her name’s Dani, and she looks like… uh, this, but smaller?” he said, gesturing to himself.

“T—tr—tr—” The figure was now refusing to make eye contact.

“No, ‘Dani.’ With a ‘D—’”

Danny realized what the figure was looking at instead of him, but it was too late.

It was already lunging towards the fire, tearing the pan off it and— 

— _throwing the pan’s contents onto him._

“ _Trespasser!_ ”

And then Danny screamed in agony and blacked out.


	3. i fucked with forces that our eyes can’t see

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a slightly atypical day in the life of mr. flynnstone vitamin

Here is a list of questions that Flynn asked himself when he thought about his elaborate fantasy where some fascinated reporter from National Geographic interviewed him.

**What was the hardest thing to get used to?**

The light, constant and sourceless. Even though it’s not very bright, it’s really noticeable because it’s green, which is the color that light never was in the real world.

It seems like it should be trivial, but because the light has no source, there’s no day-night cycle. Sleeping was a pain in the ass for a while. So was spotting approaching ghosts. Flynn got used to being constantly on edge.

**What’s something that was really difficult at first, but is second nature now?**

Getting water. He definitely would’ve died if he hadn’t gotten lucky on that front.

He didn’t know how long he floated there, staring at the place where a portal had definitely  _ just  _ been, but the trance was broken when he realized that he was actually pretty thirsty. At first he could get by off the water bottle in his bag, but what happened after that was another song and dance.

Procuring water meant having to find a realm that contained ice, as the Ghost Zone had no natural weather, and any standing water usually turned out to be either foul or not water at all. The Far Frozen was a good bet, though its dense population was something to look out for. Klemper’s realm was the second best; the ice didn’t form easily broken icicles there, but ice from the underside of the walking surface was clean enough. Both of them were too screamingly cold for him to stay too long.

Though when he was younger Flynn had quickly jammed icicles into his mouth upon stumbling on them, he was more cautious now. Procuring water usually meant boiling, which meant twenty minutes over a fire. Fire meant hunting for a realm with actual trees, or, failing that, at least some highly combustible garbage.

Flynn had cooked his first real meal in the Ghost Zone over a trash can he’d swiped from that shadowy high school before the hall monitor started chasing him.

**What was the meal?**

Getting food was a bit easier than water, if only because his standards were lower. Eating ectoplasm is probably inadvisable, but eating his lone blood blossom was not an option.

When Flynn was running from the hall monitor, its jaw unhinging at him, he raised the blood blossom in front of his face and it had suddenly braked, hissing, before hairpinning around and going to give a ghostly teenager a dress code violation because her poodle skirt was too short. Same for Klemper, or the denizens of the Far Frozen.

Yet this only worked against one of them. He couldn’t skim off the vending machines in Casper High forever, because once they figured out the trick they just had another hall monitor come in from behind.

Flynn scratched the scar across his shoulder before approaching the intruder. The ghost appeared young, but when the young ones were angry they were vicious. Vicious ghosts were unstable ghosts. Unstable ghosts usually splattered into ectoplasm in this situation. And yet the ghost was still lying on the ground twitching and blindly pawing around.

Well, that was odd. But at least it wasn’t a mess. Flynn turned it over with his foot and prepared to roll it off the edge of the realm.

Hold that thought.

He felt the thick air of the greater ghost zone woosh down and break around his legs like an inverted wave. Flynn stopped in his tracks — such a thing he had only felt when a large craft was trying to land on the realm.

Flynn looked up. A large craft was trying to land on the realm.

Well, shit. He broke into a run.

**What’s the closest you ever got to going home?**

Flynn zig-zagged through the black trees. It was tough, because the craft was pushing even more thick air down onto the ground. He looked over his shoulder — he’d never seen anything like it. He’d seen boats and airplanes before, but never this oblong silver thing, and never near this realm. It wasn’t the sort of place people  _ stumbled _ upon.

The hood of the craft slid back, and two figures jumped out. Flynn slowed — they didn’t seem to see him. “Danny!” they cried, mobbing around the young ghost. The ghost did something that flashed, but the figures’ bodies blocked his vision.

Humans. Ghosts didn’t block out light that way. They must have passed through a natural portal. 

Other humans fell through natural portals all the time, usually by accident. Often they died. Sometimes a ghost decided to “adopt” them. The singer, McClain, was the most popular suspect lately — some of her groupies had died with her during the catastrophic pyrotechnics accident at her debut concert, but they weren’t nearly enough to support her ballooningly large tours through the Ghost Zone. The runner-up was Skulker, whose motives were less benign, to say the least.

Still, Flynn had never met a human who stayed as long as he had, or really stayed at all. If they weren’t struck down on arrival their mission was to find another portal.

Wherein lay the problem.

It took Flynn a year to find another portal, and when he did he leapt through. Grass crunched under his shoes. For once, his eyes weren’t assaulted by the constant green light but instead the light of the moon, and a cool, thin wind blew through his hair.

He whooped breathlessly for joy.

And then he didn’t.

Flynn had no idea where he was. He looked around, but only saw… well, even calling them crude buildings was a bit generous, as even in the dark he could see sap coming out of the wooden boards. The nearest one to him was on the outskirts, separated from the other buildings by a space of bloodied dirt and offal. Two famine-stricken dogs nosed obscenely at a pig’s skull.

A large, burly woman came out of the building, wearing a long apron, frayed at the edges with hand-done stitching, toting another pig’s skull by the jaw. She hurled it into the ditch. One of the dogs jumped away from the mess in fright and scampered by Flynn.

The burly woman gave Flynn a single glance, turned to walk back inside, before seemingly realizing that he was a stranger.

“What?” she said. “Art thee lost ‘r something?”

Flynn’s breath hitched in his throat. “Uh — I’m — I’m sorry, do you know the way to Arkansas from here?”

“What is an ‘Arkansas?’” the woman said, her brow creased.

His heart dropped. “Wh-where is this?”

“This is Plymouth Colony, son. Art thee humour quite right?”

Oh, damn.

He got lucky — the portal was just beginning to close when he jumped back through. But he didn’t feel lucky.

He’d encountered many portals by now, but none of them went back to  _ quite _ the right time. As it turned out, time was a very, very, very long continuum. The fact that the Ghost Zone only existed as long as human life had narrowed the field slightly, but two hundred thousand years of history still meant that Flynn would be lucky to find a portal that opened in the right century, much less the right decade.

Sometimes he thought about the people who hadn’t stayed. He’d tried to get one to stay sometimes, and it was easy when he was young and they thought they needed to take care of him, but eventually they decided that whether it was the right time or not, they had to go back to the human world.

Sometimes Flynn thought about what would happen if he did find a portal to the right time, because what even  _ was _ the right time? If his math was right, he had been in the Ghost Zone for ten years, and it almost certainly wasn’t.

Flynn turned and left. The humans could figure it out themselves.

**Where is home?**

Home was a narrow shaft carved out of the hillside, hemmed with open-air walls of stone brick. At the shaft’s end there was a small, unsuspecting door, like the door to a particularly ignoble closet. Above it was a squat triangle, barely more than a gap.

Flynn took his thin walking stick and, looking over his shoulder, took out a ball of twine and a curved, sharp glowing stone. The last hook had come unglued from the stick; he’d considered carving a hook into the stick itself, but the ectoranium was too useful to turn down.

Instead of approaching the door head-on, he climbed up the hill that its retaining walls held at bay. Then, above and slightly to the side of the gap, he reached into it with his hook and, with a practiced gesture, pulled the latch open. He dropped down in front of the door and rushed into it, closing it behind himself with a sigh.

The large, stony cairn smelled like cold dust and blood. In the center, there was a stone fireplace. In the far corner, near the opposite door, there was Flynn’s stuff — a pile of bedding, mostly made up of furs from Skulker and cloth from almost anywhere he could find it. Half of his worldly possessions were otherwise strewn across the cairn’s floor, the other half abandoned at camp, Flynn thought, wincing at what he had left. He could maybe still cook with the bowl that he’d gotten from the lunch lady, but frying pans were probably invented for a reason. If he got back there and it was gone, he’d have to go back to her cafeteria for a new one. Her meatloaf had sustained him for a bit in the early days, but she got upset when he pointed out he needed to eat a vegetable or he’d get scurvy, and he wasn’t sure whether she’d forgotten about that yet.

In any case, his life was more important than any object, thought Flynn, using a piece of flint to light the fireplace. No two ways about it.

**Why here?**

Flynn picked up his stick and walked over to the far door. He knocked, shave-and-a-haircut style, before walking into the next room.

The other room was much the same as the last, though instead of a fireplace there was a sort of borehole in the floor, covered by a rough and square slab of rock. Dragging the rock away, Flynn took the rope and the bucket tied to it and threw it down the hole. There was a clatter.

Flynn frowned before realizing the problem. His head snapped towards the far wall.

Without thinking, he had put his stick down on one of the coffins like it was a coffee table. “Sorry,” he whispered, picking it up.

There was a faint rustle from inside the coffin, like its occupant turning over, and a gurgle from the well. Flynn drew up the bucket, now heavy. It was now a full container of blood, with bits of vague and shattered bone bobbing on the surface.

He didn’t know where it came from, and he didn’t ask. “Thank you,” he said, and brushed a little dust off the coffin. “I’m going to make some more soup with this. I’ll clean in a minute.”

And he went on with his day, the intruder now hardly on his mind.

**Author's Note:**

> fun fact: my dad wanted to proofread this fic for "anti-communist content" because if it has any he thinks that biden's police will take it down. it's nice that he cares, i guess
> 
> anyway, for those not in the know, flynn fenton is from one of butch hartman's extra-canon youtube videos, wherein he is danny's secret brother who fell in a ghost portal when he was a baby. it is just as ridiculous as it sounds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_BOcdFFz90
> 
> this interpretation of flynn is partially based on @the-stove-is-on-fire's: https://the-stove-is-on-fire.tumblr.com/post/637345932849053696/time-to-retcon-this-flynn-nonsense. namely him being danny's cousin instead of brother, but from here it largely spins off into being its own thing.
> 
> i don't think this first chapter is my best work, but that's just the burden of trying to be the first fic in the flynn fenton tag babey


End file.
